Investigating the diffusion of English neologisms on the Internet

Conference item

The subject of this paper is to historical lexicography what the history of humankind is to the history of the universe – a tiny but particularly relevant and exciting recent fragment. While it is debatable whether a project which aims to investigate short-term developments reaching back no more than a few years belongs to the field of historical lexicography at all, the issue of the diffusion of neologisms has always been of major concern for lexicographers – if only when it comes to deciding if a word is to be included in a dictionary or not. And the social (and cognitive) processes involved in the early phases of the spread of new words are of interest to historical lexicology and lexicography anyway.

It is, therefore, with not too much hesitation that this proposal for a paper introducing a project called EnerG (English neologisms research group) is submitted to ICHLL5. The project, which operates in consultation with the OED, addresses the following questions:

• What are the circumstances under which new words are coined? What are the coiners' motives and aims?
• Which social factors and processes foster and hinder the diffusion of new English words and expressions?
• What are the cognitive factors involved in the entrenchment of new words in the minds of the individual members of the speech community?
• How do cognitive and social factors interact?
• What role do recurrent linguistic patterns around the new words, for example collocations, play in their entrenchment and diffusion?

The paper will present methodologies developed for the identification of new words on the Internet and for charting their diffusion across domains and registers as well as the development of cotextual patterns and collocations.

Authors: Schmid, H

• Alternative title: Presented at Language and Usage session
• Publication status: Not published
• Peer review status: Reviewed (other)
• Language: English
• Subjects: English Language and Literature